The Starving Artist

Written by: Angie Noll

As artists, we often have to give our craft away for free in order to attract the attention that we need for sales to happen further down the line. This is fine, and we all do it, but there has to come a point where we stop working for free and start charging what we’re worth. For some, this is the challenging part.

We are divine enough to ask, and we are important enough to receive.
– Wayne Dyer

My grandmother, a proper German frau, was one of the most giving and generous people in my life. Especially when it came to her family. Sunday lunch at her house was characterised by a heavily laden table, and she made sure everyone, especially the children, ate enough to keep them going for the coming week. Cooking was her creative expression, and she did it well.

Even in the business, started by my grandfather when they emigrated to South Africa with their two small preschool aged boys, she gave generously. Her roles included receptionist, bookkeeper, customer service, cleaning lady and tea lady, while also ensuring that she prepared fresh food for breakfast and lunch for both her and my grandfather. When they arrived home at night, she found time to tend her vegetable patch and cook an evening meal from scratch. Every single day.

Even into old age, my grandmother was someone we could turn to with any problem – from financial difficulties to emotional or parenting ones. She was always generous with her time, her resources and her heart.

The one thing she wasn’t so good with, though, was allowing herself to receive the same generosity from others. We couldn’t give her a Christmas present or take her out for a meal, or even help with the Sunday lunch washing up without her putting up resistance.

Generosity is definitely a worthy characteristic to cultivate, but so is its partner, the ability to receive.

Why you should learn to receive

I know quite a few truly wonderful artists who simply cannot bring themselves to receive money (or praise) for their creations. They feel guilty, like frauds, or embarrassed and undeserving.

None of those emotions are conducive to warm-hearted receiving – instead, they act like doors that we shut every time the universe wants to gift us in some way. And then we wonder why our creative dreams are not manifesting when we’re working so hard at making them come true.

So the trick is learning to receive without these underlying emotions, openly and genuinely, so that the Universe can continue to gift us – with abundance, joy, health, dreams coming true and unexpected surprises.

The proverbial ‘starving artist’ label doesn’t have to apply to you.

What can you do to learn to receive?

Here are the things that I do every day to increase my ability to receive without reservation – not only in my art but in life. I make receiving the joy that life has to offer a way of life and allow that perspective to filter down into my creative pursuits.

Chakras

Yes, we’re getting esoteric here, but that’s because I use my intuition to help me with my art, so I pay attention to my energy body. Where else do you think ‘inspiration’ comes from if not some a source higher than ourselves?

I open all my chakras every day since these are the channels through which we are able to receive.

Simply visualise a white ball above your crown chakra, inhale and bring the ball down into the root chakra. Visualise the white energy cleaning and opening that chakra. I say to myself, “My root chakra is open and balanced and ready to receive the gifts of this day.” Then exhale and send the white ball of energy back up to your crown chakra.

Repeat this exercise for all your chakras and finish with, “All my channels of reception are open and I am ready to receive the gifts of this day.”

It sounds long, but it only takes two or three minutes once you get the hang of it.

My personal affirmation

“I gratefully receive the gifts of this day.”

I mentally repeat this affirmation to myself frequently throughout the day.

And then I actively look for gifts that I receive throughout the day to be grateful for – I don’t sit back and wait for them to fall into my lap. I seek them out. From an inspirational (in-spirit) writing session to the sunshine to the acceptance of a guest post or short story to a great cup of tea. These are all gifts, and I train myself to see them as such.

Purposefully cultivate intense feelings of gratitude

When I notice the gifts of the day, I make a conscious effort to verbalise them and thank the Universe for them. For instance, when the sun is shining, I say, “Thank you for this lovely gift of sunshine. I gratefully accept it!”

And I mean it – not only because I live in Auckland where there isn’t nearly enough sun for my African Soul, but because I work to cultivate a feeling of intense gratitude within myself. You can’t just pay lip service to gratitude and then expect the magic to happen.

I can’t emphasise this enough. I make myself feel the gratitude, and until I feel it bubbling up from deep inside of me, I keep at it, searching for gifts that I can choose to receive if I bother to notice them until I find something that makes me feel undeniably, unquenchably grateful. Then I mindfully hold on to that feeling throughout the day.

What to do when you’re feeling grumpy, stressed or irritated

I know that it’s all good and well to talk about noticing how many gifts there are to receive every day, but then there are those days….

Just yesterday, I woke up feeling mildly irritated, but after an hour with the kids and the dog and the rainy, soggy weather, I felt well and truly pissed off. I realised that I often get to this point – days of insane gratitude followed by a few days of irritability, impatience at things not moving at my preferred speed, and finding fault with everything and everyone around me.

What this translates to is days and days of cultivating the ability to receive, and then undoing all that hard work when things don’t feel quite so hunky-dory. That’s no way to manifest!

Here’s what I do:

I acknowledge the fact that I’m a human being, with a wide range of emotions to experience, and it’s ok to do so.

AND

I work with small internal changes and adjustments throughout the day to avoid slipping into anger, despair or resentment. I continue to seek out the gifts of the day, I continue to be actively grateful and I do all the things listed above, but I accept that on these days, the experience of gratitude is a bit less intense than on other days. And that is just fine too.

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Published by Angie Noll

4 thoughts on “The Starving Artist”

Loved this post. And this sentence made me crack up! It didn’t end the way I expected.

“Just yesterday, I woke up feeling mildly irritated, but after an hour with the kids and the dog and the rainy, soggy weather, I felt well and truly pissed off.”

I was sure you were going to say you woke up mildly irritated but spending time with kids and dog you were grateful, blah blah blah…. I just read it again and laughed out loud! You’re such an engaging writer and skillful teacher!

Thank you for this post. I’m going to copy and paste it to save the ideas to follow on a daily basis.
I do keep a gratitude journal. Sometimes I’m lax about it but it’s fantastic for those times when I really need support. Even thinking of three of the tiniest or most easily taken for granted joys helps get me into a more positive mood. Remembering that it’s a gift to have a safe bed in which to sleep, clean drinking water and a pet who loves me makes me think of the more important things in life. And when I don’t have the will/time/energy to write in the book I can just look back at what I wrote and recall the feelings of gratitude.

Thanks for your comment, Natasha! And yes, that’s exactly it;-) I always feel that if I can’t find at least 30 things to be grateful for by the time I go to bed, then I wasn’t looking hard enough. It’s like you say – if we can remember to be grateful for all those many things we take for granted, like the cup of clean water, the soft bed, the glorious sunshine/rain, depending on which part of the world you’re in, our pets and their love…. then it’s almost impossible to not feel gratitude every single day. And then, when the big, obvious things come to be grateful for, like a dream coming true, it doesn’t feel like such a threat either, because gratitude, for big and small, has become the norm. Thank you for sharing your thoughts!